Yaesu VR-5000 Operating Manual

Yaesu VR-5000 Communications Receiver
Reviewed by Rick Lindquist, N1RL
ARRL Senior News Editor
A ham friend spotted the VR-5000 sit-
ting on a table next to my amateur sta-
tion. "Hey! New transceiver?" he asked.
"No," I said. "It's Yaesu's new dc-to-day-
light receiver-scanner."
My friend seemed a little disap-
pointed, and that's a common reaction
among those who believe that anything
in a box with a dial, buttons and a fre-
quency display must also be capable of
transmitting to have real value.
While it's true that many of us ama-
teurs live to transmit there are occasions
when just listening can be as much or
even more fun.
The Yaesu VR-5000 communications
receiver gives you access to a lot of wide-
open listening spaces. It also includes
some dandy features you probably don't
have on any of your amateur transceivers.
A Quick Overview
What's in the little black box? Well, it's
a general-coverage, multimode receiver
that can help you get acquainted with the
radio frequency real estate between 100
kHz and 2600 MHz (cellular excluded).
This includes nearly all of the major Ama-
teur Radio allocations as well as some
potential bands we haven't yet acquired
title to but might, such as 136 kHz and
5 MHz. The VR-5000 also can give you
entrée to UHF bands your H-T or VHF-
UHF mobile likely do not cover. For ex-
ample, AO-40 (as of press time) was trans-
mitting telemetry only on its 2.4 GHz
beacon. Unfortunately for scanner fans,
the VR-5000 lacks trunk-tracking capabil-
ity, a desirable feature found in scanners
within the same general price range.
Available modes for the main receiver
include FM (narrow and wide), AM (nar-
row and wide), LSB/USB, and CW. The
sub-receiver operates either in AM or FM.
Other goodies include 2000 regular
memories, 50 band-edge memories, and
five preset channels. With that many
memories, you should not have a problem
storing all of your favorite short-wave and
public safety frequencies. Additionally,
the 50 programmable search ranges allow
setting up many discrete spectrum seg-
ments for searching. The five preset
memories are great for quickly getting to
those most special frequencies—the local
repeaters, for example, or possibly the
Amateur Radio on the International Space
Station—or ARISS—2-meter downlinks.
There's a sub-receiver that lets you make
excursions from the main dial setting up
to 20 MHz away.
Connectors on the rear apron let you
hook up a coaxial fed antenna (there's an
SO-239) or an unbalanced high-imped-
ance antenna. Also on the back of the ra-
dio are a jack, a switch to select
MUTE
the antenna jack, A or B, an external
speaker jack, a record jack (constant 8
mV) that provides output unaffected by
the volume or tone controls; a +8 V jack
for accessories, an IF output jack (10.7
MHz), and a nine-pin Computer Aided
Transceiver, or CAT, serial (RS-232C)
computer control jack.
The serial jack suggests the option of
greater external control than is actually
possible. PC control of the VR-5000 is
limited to the main VFO frequency, re-
ceive mode and channel step.
One neat feature is called Program-
mable Memory Recall. PMR lets you set
up the radio to monitor activity on up to
50 memory channels at the same time.
Why would you want to do that? Glad you
asked. Yaesu suggests that this capabil-
ity could come in handy if you wanted to
monitor traffic levels on several repeater
sites. The PMR Board on the display
gives a graphical representation of chan-
nel occupancy at a given time.
Another is the Band Scope. This lets
you view activity on either side of your
current operating frequency. Move the
channel marker to a signal you spot, and
you're there.
For prospective short-wave listeners
(SWLs), Yaesu has thoughtfully pro-
grammed a block of popular international
broadcast outlets, such as Radio
Bottom Line
The VR-5000 Communications
Receiver opens the door to endless
exploration in a nearly boundless
range of radio spectrum—but don't
forget to bring along the manual!
Nederland, Radio Australia and Deutsche
Welle. This is a great help to new hams
who often cut their radio teeth as SWLs.
Using It
We amateurs tend to expect receivers
to be uncomplicated devices that are
simple to use. After all, there's no trans-
mitter in the box—how hard could it be,
right? Well, not so fast there, VOX breath!
We determined that while the VR-5000
is pretty easy to hook up and get squawk-
ing, making it do what we wanted takes
a bit more TLC.
Our resident scanner buff tried putting
the Operating Manual aside to see how
easy it would be to play with the features
and how much he could figure out on his
own. "While I was able to operate in the
VFO mode, it was not long before I had
to hit the book," he reported.
In short, the VR-5000 is not always
very intuitive to use, and on occasion it
could get downright frustrating when
you'd unintentionally back yourself into
some nook or cranny by pushing a wrong
button. There are a keypad and a lot of
buttons, most of them with at least two
discrete functions and not all obvious by
their labels. On the other hand, some but-
tons that seemed to be obvious—weren't!
Pushing the key is supposed to se-
BANK
lect the desired memory bank. On all oc-
casions, pushing this button took us to a
setup menu that let the user modify the
current memory bank or create a new one
altogether.
It can take many keystrokes on the
VR-5000 to reach a desired state or to pro-
gram a block of channels. Going strictly
by the book, it takes a dozen steps to set
the handy on-screen world clock (with
accompanying map graphic) that gives
time reference to 66 different areas of the
world. We found that it was easy to mess
up on the steps, and that programming
From June 2001 QST © 2001